“... point, of an artist’s work and then describing the impression that art makes on an open mind. (David Sylvester was especially good at this.) It has seldom generated a productive debate because it tends to be defensive, but also because there is such a fear of encouraging philistinism or of being mistaken for a philistine. Artists themselves have not always ...”

“... of Racial Capitalism in South Africa’, by the South African historians Martin Legassick and David Hemson. In the late 1970s, the official position of the UN’s International Labour Organisation was that the policy of apartheid was in direct conflict with economic growth, and that growth would eventually undermine and force an end to ...”

“... diary might not be quite a classic, but it becomes one in the hands of its exemplary editor David Vaisey, who has trimmed it to not much more than a third of its original length, and richly supplemented its information about the village’s inhabitants and about Turner’s family and business. In this way he quietly helps to substantiate the observation ...”

“... 1977. In that year, two contributors to a Times Literary Supplement survey, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, spoke so highly of her work as to effect a change in this situation. Three more novels by Barbara Pym were published, this time by Macmillan, who finally added to them in 1982 – two years after the writer had herself died – the book originally ...”

“... business: theirs was to pay and obey. Their leaders promised not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms ...”

“... have to hold my breath for fear of infecting the people who come near me.’ A view shared by David Gascoyne (with whom she was briefly in love, she nearly 40, he not yet 20), who wrote: ‘On the whole, I think her influence on the people she comes in contact with is bad ... There are very few who can stand the dazzling (but how depressing!) light of ...”

“... is reproduced on the dust-jacket of Marvell and Liberty, a collection of essays which, like David Norbrook’s recent Writing the English Republic, chimes with the discontent that a significant percentage of British people now feels about the monarchy. That sense of friendship, of a shared and living republican culture, is present in Melville’s many ...”

“... sophisticated poems steeped in Baudelaire and the fin de siècle. Praising its ‘opulence of means and melodies, the pleure dans le coeur, the combination of buoyancy in the verse and ballast in the feeling’, Heaney concludes: ‘I see Milosz calls poetry a dividend from ourselves: high yields, mon vieux.’ Christopher Reid, the editor of this weighty ...”

“... life must be municipalised, will not fail to demand that this great necessity of joy, or … the means of joy, be also supplied by their local councils.’ In 1930, an MP observed that a young person today lives in a municipal house, and he washes himself … in municipal water. He rides on a municipal tram or omnibus, and I have no doubt that before long ...”

“... of Karl Marx and Jesus Christ, with quite a bit of Tolstoy and Gandhi thrown in. Not using money means that they pick up food from bins: they have regular haunts, up and down the country, and they visit them when travelling around to give out leaflets. ‘We feel joy at all this free food,’ Alf said. ‘And you also feel disgusted to see all this rubbish ...”

“... England – never again could the Scots deceive themselves that the English lacked the will or the means to conquer them.’ No really equal confederation of states was possible. Recent subjection had only emphasised a fundamental and inescapable imbalance. Today England represents about 85 per cent of the United Kingdom’s population, Scotland about 9 per ...”

“... one of the indestructible balls made by elves in The Lord of the Rings: in Tolkien’s Elvish it means ‘one that sees from afar’. The company was founded on a simple premise: governments and public agencies hold a lot of information, but it is siloed and poorly organised. If properly collated and arranged, the data could be employed to enormously ...”

“... characterised by the more or less dominating role which the ‘concept’ plays in it. It is by no means necessary that a concept must be connected with a sensorially cognisable and reproducible sign (word); but when this is the case, thinking becomes by means of that fact communicable.So, for Einstein, the attempt to grasp ...”

“... portrait, albeit of a distinctively colonial character and quality. Last year, the art historian David Bindman, who has studied the picture closely for thirty years, proposed that it is in fact a self-portrait, painted by Williams himself.What is the intent of the image and what is created by its beholders? The problem of Francis Williams’s portrait shows ...”

“... else is bilge’ (the German quark, which has since made its way into English, literally means ‘soft white cheese’). But whatever the conditions in which she found herself – in Warsaw, she was one of 14 political prisoners crammed into a single cell – she never lost her fervour: her joy, as she put it, amid the horrors of the world. ‘My ...”